> environmental groups have already denounced the proclamation's potential to allow for high-rises in residential neighborhoods
That's not an "environmental group." They may call themselves that, but there's no need for journalists to credulously repeat it. There is no "environmental" argument for preventing new residential buildings, even tall ones, from being built in existing urban residential neighborhoods. To protect the environment this is even necessary. I hope there are some real environmental orgs in Hawaii fighting back against greenfield development by supporting urban infill.
Environmentalism is a big coalition, not just one focused on climate change. There’s a lot of people who oppose “the concrete jungle.” Most existing environmental laws, dating to the 1970s, are geared to them, not the more recent (or recently understood) problem of climate change.
Environmental Impact Studies have been used to halt a wide number of projects that could be hugely beneficial to society, from green energy and nuclear, to multi-unit dwellings and mass transit. There is an entire industry of attorneys who specializes in suing to stop projects like this, and in some cases, if they win they an get their fees paid for by the state under "environmental justice" laws.
In short, using environmental protection to halt projects is mostly a NIMBY farce.
Unlike what the headline suggests, and how I'm sure this will be spun, the main reason for this was cost. San Francisco has some of the most expensive hotel inventory in the country.
Perhaps this is related to the very low number of hotel rooms in San Francisco -- 1/3 the number that exist in Atlanta, and 1/2 of the number in Phoenix. San Francisco makes it as hard as possible to add new inventory to this market.
There's a concerted media effort by conservative outlets to paint SF in a bad light. We have plenty of problems; plenty of self-made problems. But outsiders literally conspiring to harangue us says more about them than it does us.
I agree that the hotel prices definitely drive people out, but also the general logistics problems, and things to do that aren't a conference are really silly in San Francisco compared to holding it in other more tourist-focused areas like Las Vegas. Las Vegas is capable of holding simultaneous high headcount events, and has the infrastructure to get a large number of tourists around without even batting an eye.
I'd be interested to hear other people's experiences but it feels like most conferences in San Francisco would start to become miserable in hotel price and commuting for people coming from out of town once you start getting to 20,000 or more people.
"You've been in therapy for some time now, and have started to be able to realize what is a rational fear and what is not. You feel like you might be simply being insecure ..."
I think this is the gist of the entire ordeal of depression. You simply mature up and grow out of it in time.
Taxes on vehicles and gasoline do not remotely cover the costs of road construction, let alone the costs of urban parking. Private vehicles are intensely subsidized.
Well this is a pretty heartless way to refer to a disaster involving 188 people. (Title currently: "Lion Air's brand new Boeing 737 MAX8 crashes into sea")
I don't know that there's a good way to be both concise and informative about disasters like this without being somewhat heartless, especially when the event is so recent. Having a less-editorialized title would definitely help, though - there's something particularly callous about implicit speculation so soon.
Totally. If you can make instant coffee that tastes even okay, it would be revolutionary for backpacking.
Coffee is the most important thing my partner and I check to make sure we have before we enter the backcountry. And it's always instant, not out of preference or cost concerns, but weight.
"When we started the training process, many of us thought that the “fingerprint” feature described above would be the “silver bullet” that would crack the problem for us. We were surprised to note that this wasn’t the case at all — in fact, it was features based on the dispersion of parking locations that turned out to be one of the most powerful predictors of parking difficulty."
I assume dispersion of parking locations is the distance from parking location to destination? I would have liked to see more about what kinds of inputs they used and how they cleaned them up to account for the confounding factors they mention (public transit users, private parking.)
